Entertainment

MySpace to Push Open Platform with Korea Launch

MySpace presses onwards with its localized global expansion. Korea is the latest stop on the MySpace trail, with some attention to cultural details that are a bit more focused than some of MySpace's other localized efforts.

As MySpace already mentioned, it's attempt to capture the highly active Korean online market includes a network emphasis on blogging and lifestreaming, to a certain extent. This looks to be more than what you'll find on a typical US MySpace page, and rightly so. What's more, is the focus on music and video content, with dedicated sections for both media types. These will encompass the localized versions of MySpaceTV and MySpace Music, which is quite similar to what we already have in the US as well.

As Korea already has a healthy amount of competition that MySpace will need to go up against, the large social network will also be pouring a lot of resources into pushing its open platform in Korea, too. This may or may not help MySpace compete in Korea's local market; on the one hand, an open platform encourages activity from the developer community, which provides more value to users in the end.

On the other hand, a failure to competently go up against local Korean competition will minimize the impact that an open platform can have. As we've seen with YouTube, deploying localized versions of a hugely popular, US-based site doesn't always equal immediate success, so we'll have to keep watch to see how MySpace's conscious efforts to appeal to Korea's localized market will pay off when it's all said and done.

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